From Urbicide to Socialist Metropole. Swiss Journalists' Views of Warsaw

Matthieu Gillabert FROM URBICIDE TO SOCIALIST METROPOLE. SWISS JOURNALISTS’ VIEWS OF WARSAW AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1945-1960)1 During the Second World War, Warsaw suffered immense destruction, both human and material. Proportionally, the city suffered most from the conflict2. Therefore, making this trauma visible became a crucial issue in Poland, in political, media, economic, and cultural terms. For Swiss journalists as well as for their readers, this situation was very different from Switzerland’s reality during the conflict. Although this country had been affected by the war, it was largely spared violence and destruction. The communist takeover in Poland further widened the distance. The analysis of how Swiss journalists who visited Warsaw in the first decade after the conclusion of the war tried to bridge this gap is at the heart of this contribution. It focuses not only on the confron- tation between two opposed experiences but also on the ways journalists ob- tained information that was subsequently disseminated in Switzerland. This article on foreign journalists in post-war Poland is part of a history of foreigners’ travels to dictatorships. Several historical studies have focused on trips 1 The author expresses his gratitude to the Muzeum Warszawy staff and to the colleagues from The Uni- versity of Warsaw Historical Institute for organizing the conference “Foreigners in Warsaw. 1945-2018” (6-7 December 2018), where he presented this paper. He thanks also Audrey Bonvin and Sabine Widmer for their proofreading. 2 The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster, eds L.J. Vale, T.J. Campanella, New York 2005, p. 10. 233 Matthieu Gillabert to the USSR during the interwar period3 and more recently to Nazi Germany and to Fascist Italy4. These studies often highlight the control exercised by official in- stitutions over these travels (cultural diplomacy and propaganda, police surveil- lance, etc.) and the representations imported by travelers. Research on travels to the capitals of People’s Democracies still remains very limited. As these cities were deemed closed to cultural exchanges, this foreign presence was frequently hidden. In his monograph comparing the representations of Warsaw and Bucha- rest, Błażej Brzostek analyzed some articles of travelers during the 19th and the 20th centuries. In particular, he showed how Warsaw, a colorful capital, became an exception among the Eastern Bloc capitals in the 1950s5. For Jerzy Kochanows- ki, Warsaw continued to be, if not cosmopolitan like in the interwar period, at least international: first as an exotic capital for refugees from the West and after 1956 as a “promises land” attracting citizens from the socialist countries6. In the post-1956 period, Russian students were shocked by the liberalism they met in the Polish capital, especially in the local student clubs7. The presence of foreign journalists is also a question of truth and legiti- mation. While these journalists played the role of objective observers, guar- antors of the truth, they legitimized the discourse of the inviting authorities. However, to strike a balance, they needed a freedom that could lead them to a heterodox discourse8. It was a subtle game between the ethics of the journalists and the political conditions of producing their articles. By focusing on Swiss journalists traveling to Warsaw, this article first aims to understand the local production context of the articles they published in Switzerland. In the Cold War context, information on the situation behind the Iron Curtain was always subject to some control. This control was not only exerted by the authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland, but also on the Swiss side, by governmental organizations or editorial boards9. Despite Swit- zerland’s official policy of neutrality, its elites were joined in strong anticom- munism, which created distrust of the journalists who visited the countries of the Eastern Bloc. To cross the Iron Curtain was already considered subver- sive, at least until the so-called political “thaw”. Second, this foreign perspective on Warsaw from the postwar period until the turn of the 1960s aims to demonstrate how different representations of this city were produced through interviews with inhabitants, guided tours, supervision by the Polish government and Swiss humanitarian organiza- 3 R. Mazuy, Croire plutôt que voir?: voyages en Russie soviétique (1919–1939), Paris 2002. 4 F. Sallée, Sur les chemins de terre brune: voyages dans l’Allemagne nazie, 1933-1939, Paris 2017. 5 B. Brzostek, Paryże innej Europy: Warszawa i Bukareszt, XIX i XX wiek, Warszawa 2015. 6 J. Kochanowski, „Foreign Residents in Warsaw, 1945–1956”, Acta Poloniae Historica 2014, 110, p. 111-133. 7 P. Babiracki, “Two Stairways to Socialism: Soviet Youth Activists in Polish Spaces, 1957-1964”, in: Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War. Exploring the Second World, eds. P. Babiracki, J. Austin, MacMillan, 2017, pp. 79-105. 8 N. Domeier, J. Happel, “Journalismus und Politik. Einleitende Überlegungen zur Tätigkeit von Auslandskor- respondenten 1900-1970”, in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, Bd. 62, No. 5 (2014), pp. 389-397. 9 M. Gillabert, Dans les coulisses de la diplomatie culturelle suisse : objectifs, réseaux et réalisations (1938- 1984), Neuchâtel, Alphil, 2013. 234 From urbicide to socialist metropole. Swiss journalists’ views... tions in Poland. These reports show a common perception of the city, giving Warsaw a new identity. Lynch wrote that the perception of a city corresponds to a system of representations which is based on the uniqueness, the urban structure as well as emotional and cognitive perceptions10. How did Swiss journalists perceive the image of Warsaw after the War? Moreover, I would like to add a second level of analysis by underlining that representations of otherness always hide representations and discourses about oneself. The historian Robert Frank emphasized that representations based on previous stereotypes reflect – by oppositions, analogies, allusions – a subject’s concerns about himself and his background11. This article addresses these questions during three successive phases after World War II. It starts by focusing on the first journalists who visited the ruins of the Polish capital in the aftermath of the war. In the second part, the analysis of reports and articles written on the occasion of the 5th World Festi- val of Youth and Students shows that this event was a turning point in the representations of Warsaw in foreign media. Finally, the article focuses on self- representations in the texts about Warsaw written by Swiss journalists after 1956. The political and urbanistic changes in the Polish capital contrasted with the feeling of stagnation in Switzerland shared by some non-conformist journalists. Through these different reports, Swiss journalists consistently made a clear distinction between the communist regime and the Polish people. This could be explained by the radical changes experienced in Poland where the new government appears to the Swiss journalist as an import product from the USSR and by the fact that Polishness was never considered urban. How to report destruction? The after-war period was indeed marked by an important change from the former system of depicting Warsaw. From the beginning of the 20th century until the end of the Second World War, there had only been a few publications about Warsaw in Switzerland. These articles highlighted the city’s cosmopoli- tanism, its exoticism (especially with regard to its poor East-European Jewish neighborhoods) and its position at the European periphery, as a last outpost before the Soviet Union or Asia. Edmont Privat was one of the most prolific Swiss authors writing about the Polish capital12. This Esperantist scholar was supportive of the Polish state 10 K. Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge 1973. See also: “M. Certeau de et la lecture du paysage urbain: M. Certeau de, Marches dans la ville”, in: L’invention du quotidien. I Arts de faire, Paris 1994, pp. 139-163. 11 R. Frank, „Images et imaginaire dans les relations internationales depuis 1938”, Cahiers de l’IHTP 1994, (28), pp. 5-11. 12 P. Bednarz, „Szwajcarscy korespondenci wojenni w Królestwie Polskim 1914–1915”, in: Ważna obecność. Przedstawiciele państw i narodów europejskich wśród mieszkańców międzyrzecza Bugu i Pilicy w XVII-XIX wieku, eds. A. Górak, K. Latawiec, Radom 2006, pp. 277-291; P. Bednarz, “Warszawa u schyłku zaboru rosyjskiego w oczach szwajcarskiego korespondenta”, Le Temps (April 1915), Annales Universitatis Ma- riae Curie-Skłodowska - Sectio F,1998, 52/53, pp. 271-288. 235 Matthieu Gillabert before independence. During his journey, he was impressed by the multicul- turalism of the capital where inhabitants could practice a kind of ethnography toward different ethnic groups13. For Privat, “Polishness” could be found in the countryside. Indeed, Swiss authors did not consider cosmopolitan War- saw to be representative of Polish culture. This “Warsaw, the capital of Poland, this future dreamland, seems to be destined, in a not too distant future, to au- tomatically supplant Berlin in many ways.”14 These images were based on the rapid industrialization of this area and on the rise in 1918 to the status of an independent country capital city. In the Swiss liberal and anticommunist press during the interwar period, Warsaw also appeared as the last western city before the communist world. For Pierre Frederix, the French journalist who wrote in the Journal de Genève, “The Poniatowski Bridge is, at the East of Europe, the last point from where we can see the West”15. Warsaw was located on the border of the Western civiliza- tion, while travel guides and novelists like Alfred Döblin were highlighting its exotic and strange character. Swiss writer Robert de Traz wrote: “as my first day ‘flânerie’ brought me over the Vistula, where church bells were tolling at dusk, I thought I saw as far as the eye could see the steppe mixing Europe and Asia.”16 In 1945, this perception – urban dynamism, ethnic mix, peripheral situation – was completely disrupted by urbicide.

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